It was ten o'clock when Rezanov, who had supped on the Juno, met Santiago in a sandy valley half a mile from the Presidio and mounted the horse his young friend himself had saddled and brought.
The long ride was a silent one. The youth was not talkative at any time, and Rezanov was conscious of little else save an overwhelming desire to see Con-cha again. One secret of his success in life was his gift of yielding to one energy at a time, oblivious at the moment to aught that might distract or en-feeble the will. To-night, as he rode toward the Mission on as romantic a quest as ever came the way of a lover, the diplomat, the anxious director of a great Company, the representative of one of the mighty potentates of earth, were submerged, forgotten, in the thrilling anticipation of his hour with the woman for whom every fiber of his being yearned.
Nor ever was there more appropriate a setting for one of those inaugural chapters in mating, half appreciated at the time, that glimmer as a sort of morning twilight on mountain tops over the mild undulations of matrimony. The moon rode without a masking cloud across the ambiguous night blue of the California sky, a blue that looks like the fire of strange elements, where the stars glow like silver coals, and out of whose depths intense shadows of blue and black fall; shadows in which all the terres-trial world seems to float and recombine, where houses are ghosts of ancient selves and men but the eidola of forgotten dust. To-night the little estate of Juan Moraga, the most isolated and eastern of the settlement, surrounded by its high white wall, looked as unreal and formless as the blue oval of water and black trees behind it, but Rezanov knew that it enfolded warm and palpitating womanhood and was steeped in the sweetness of Castilian roses.
The riders, who had taken a path far to the east of the Mission dismounted and tied their horses among the willows, then, in their dark cloaks but a part of the shadows, stole toward the wall designed to impress hostile tribes rather than to resist on-slaught; at the first warning the settlement invari-ably fled to the church, where walls were massive and windows high.
In three of Moraga's four walls was a grille, or wicket of slender iron bars, whence the open could be swept with glass, or gun at a pinch; and toward the grille looking eastward went Rezanov as swiftly as the uneven ground would permit. As Concha watched him gather form in the moonlight and saw him jerk his cloak off impatiently, she flung her soft body against the wall and shook the bars with her strong little hands. But when he faced her she was erect and smiling; in a sudden uprush of spirits, almost indifferent. She wore a white gown and a rose in her hair. A rosebush as dense as an arbor spread its prickly arms between herself and the windows of the house.
"Good-evening," she whispered.
Rezanov gave the grill an angry shake. (San-tiago had considerately retired.) "Come out," he said peremptorily, "or let me in."
"There is but one gate, senor, and that is directly in front of the house door, that stands open--"
"Then I shall get over the wall--"
"Madre de Dios! You would leave your fine clothes and more on the thorns. My cousin planted those roses not for ornament, but to let the blood of defiant lovers. Not one has come twice--"
"Do you think I came here to talk to you through a grating? I am no serenading Spaniard."
His eyes were blazing. Adobe is not stone.
Rezanov took the light bars in both hands and wrenched them out; then, as Concha, divided be-tween laughter and a sudden timidity, would have retreated, he dexterously clasped her neck and drew her head through the embrasure. As Santiago, who had watched Rezanov from a distance with some curiosity, saw his sister's beautiful face emerge from the wall to disappear at once behind another rampart, he turned abruptly on his heel and could have wept as he thought of Pilar Ortego of Santa Barbara. But there was a hope that he would be a cadet of the Southern Company before the year was out, and his parents and hers were indulgent.
